This workshop is organised in conjunction with IEEE ICME 2020 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (http://www.2020.ieeeicme.org/ )

The workshop is organized as a collaboration of the H2020 projects Hyper360 (http://www.hyper360.eu/), ImAc (https://www.imac-project.eu/) and VRTogether (https://vrtogether.eu/).

Extended Reality (XR), which includes Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), creates entirely new ways for consumers to experience the world around them and interact with it. Within the last few years, improvements in sensor technology and processing power have led to tremendous advances in all aspects of XR hardware, and due to economies of scale of the massively growing XR market these devices are available now at a reasonable price point. On the production side, powerful low-cost systems for capturing 3D objects and volumetric video and 360° videos make it possible to create budget VR/AR productions. The same applies to the consumption side, where VR headsets like the Oculus Go or Playstation VR provide a highly immersive VR experience which is affordable for everyone.

Unfortunately, the development of tools and technologies for authoring, processing and delivering interactive XR experiences is lagging considerably behind the hardware development, which is definitely a hurdle for the cost-effective mass production of appealing XR content and scenarios. Lack of content in turn hinders broader adoption and acceptance of XR technologies by the consumer. For all these aspects, new approaches and technologies are needed in order to overcome the specific challenges of XR content creation (multimodal data, non-linear interactive storytelling, annotation and metadata models, novel compression techniques, bandwidth requirements, etc.)..

Motivated by this gap, in this special session we aim for original contributions on new approaches, technologies and tools for creating, processing and delivering interactive XR media (3D/CGI content/point clouds, 360° video, 3DoF+/6DoF video, volumetric video, spatial audio…).